The Resident: The Complete Season One

Matt Czuchry takes the lead in the medical drama The Resident as Conrad Hawkins, the maverick outspoken senior resident intern in a private hospital in Atlanta, while Manish Dayal is Devon, the first year intern he’s assigned in the show’s opening episode. Devon is smart, driven, and talented, and Conrad gives him a crash course in the reality of modern medicine that collides with his idealism—from budget constraints, to bureaucracy, to the ego of Dr. Soloman Bell (Bruce Greenwood), the chief of surgery, who is covering up his increasingly frequent surgical mistakes. Conrad, however, has a habit of playing God and it is up to Nicolette (Emily VanCamp), a gifted nurse practitioner and his former girlfriend, to be his conscience and sometimes his shadow. It’s a mix of workplace drama and medical melodrama, filled with the kinds of diagnostic mysteries and personality clashes familiar to such shows, but the portrait of veteran doctors as well as administrators who are more concerned with personal reputations, public perceptions, and profits than ethics and individual responsibility provides an interesting twist on the formula and it fuels the show’s righteous indignation (which can be a little heavy-handed at times). Shaunette Renée Wilson costars as a surgical superstar intern from Nigeria who secretly performs many of Dr. Bell’s procedures and Melina Kanakaredes is a famous oncologist who goes to extreme lengths to keep her patient’s medical records hidden. The Resident is an entertaining but in many ways still familiar addition to the medical drama genre. Compiling all 14 episodes from the 2018 debut season, this is a strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)